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Mark Blackburn

Numismatist who quit a City career for the Fitzwilliam Museum to become the leading authority on Anglo-Saxon and Viking coins

September 30 2011, 1:01am, The Times

Mark Blackburn, numismatist and Keeper of Coins and Medals at the Fitzwilliam MuseumDan White

Mark Blackburn was the outstanding British numismatist of his generation. Keeper of Coins and Medals at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, since 1991, his speciality was the coinage of the British Isles in the Viking Age, but his interests extended across Europe and Asia as far as Japan.

Born in Camberley, Surrey, in 1953, Mark Alistair Sinclair Blackburn was educated at Skinners’ School in Tunbridge Wells and went on to read chemistry at Oxford. Switching to jurisprudence, he graduated in 1975 and was called to the Bar the following year. After practising for a short time he joined Kleinwort Benson, merchant bankers in the City. He also became a Freeman of the Skinners’ Company and, in later life, a Liveryman.

From childhood, Blackburn had been fascinated…

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